Friends - to accept that we have deeply damaged, or perhaps destroyed many ecosystems, and our once prevailing economic system, is not pessimistic. To the contrary, it is highly constructive. To embrace the problem is the most positive thing to do, since only then can we identify the remaining solutions that can actually work.
If you want to get a cliff notes version of the current financial crisis I encourage you to read Paul Krugman's column in NY Times. He does a marvelous job of recapping the situation, and how other countries have navigated successfully through similar crisis in the past.
He finished with what I believe were his most important points. Shed light on the reality that we have no scarcity of ideas, ingenuity and creativity. I believe it is absolutely possible that we can derive a period of great well being and prosperity for humanity from the financial meltdown - simply by thinking different.
Here are his words, "As readers may have gathered, I believe not only that we're living in a new era of depression economics, but also that John Maynard Keynes - the economist who made sense of the Great Depression - is now more relevant than ever. Keynes concluded his masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, with a famous disquisition on the importance of economic ideas: "Soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."
"We can argue about whether that's always true, but in times like these, it definitely is. The quintessential economic sentence is supposed to be "There is no free lunch"; it says that there are limited resources, that to have more of one thing you must accept less of another, that there is no gain without pain. Depression economics, however, is the study of situations where there is a free lunch, if we can only figure out how to get our hands on it, because there are unemployed resources that could be put to work. The true scarcity in Keynes's world - and ours - was therefore not of resources, or even of virtue, but of understanding."
"We will not achieve the understanding we need, however, unless we are willing to think clearly about our problems and to follow those thoughts wherever they lead. Some people say that our economic problems are structural, with no quick cure available; but I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men."
Paul Krugman - November 20, 2008 - Read entire article here.
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